Robert Mueller is not ending the summer with a tan. The 73-year-old special counsel leading the sprawling Department of Justice investigation into alleged ties between President Donald Trump and Russia is keeping the same grueling hours he did a decade ago as director of the F.B.I. Mueller is among the first of his team to arrive in their borrowed offices inside Washington’s Patrick Henry office building every morning and one of the last to leave each night.

More of what’s going on behind Mueller’s office door is showing up in public, though, a sign of the growing momentum of his probes into possible collusion, money laundering, election hacking, and obstruction of justice. NBC News reported that Mueller has obtained notes from the phone of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, that include a cryptic reference to contributions and “RNC.” The notes were apparently taken during a meeting with Russian nationals at Trump Tower. And Politico’s Josh Dawseybroke the news that Mueller has begun working with the office of New York state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman. (The offices of Mueller and Schneiderman declined to comment.)

The special counsel’s staff had been in touch with Schneiderman’s office for months, exchanging information and discussing whether they might coordinate their efforts, because the attorney general has spent years looking into Trump’s finances. He added to that knowledge in March by hiring Howard Master, who had been deputy chief of the criminal division under former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Bharara’s office had assembled a major money-laundering case against 11 Russian companies; the scheme had been uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in a Moscow jail under mysterious circumstances. A defense lawyer who represented the Russian companies, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was part of the now-famous Trump Tower meeting, supposedly to discuss adoptions, during last year’s presidential campaign.

Also at the meeting was Manafort, a man with years of murky, multi-million-dollar international business dealings. “Manafort’s possible ties to the Kremlin are part of the investigation,” a source with knowledge of the probe says. “If he’s laundering money, you need to know who he’s laundering it for. Were they trying to buy something through Manafort? We wouldn’t necessarily need to answer that question to bring a case.”

Schneiderman’s tangled history with the Trump family adds a layer of intrigue. Back when he was merely a reality-show star and a real-estate developer, Trump donated $12,500 to help get Schneiderman elected. But in 2013 the attorney general filed a $40 million lawsuit on behalf of former Trump University students who claimed they’d been bilked. Trump filed an ethics complaint against Schneiderman, saying he’d solicited donations from Ivanka Trump while the Trump U. case was active (the complaint was dismissed). The New York Observer—owned at the time by Jared Kushner—happened to run a massive story ripping Schneiderman. And recently Schneiderman poked around inside the charities run by Trump and his son Eric.

The Russia case is, of course, strictly business. “Both Mueller and Schneiderman want to make sure they’re taking a real shot, not messing around with novel legal theory,” a source familiar with the investigation says. Schneiderman’s lieutenants have been exploring one particular piece of the puzzle since at least May: Manafort’s New York real-estate transactions. A state attorney general’s presence could also be helpful, eventually, as a legal tactic, because a president’s pardon powers do not extend to cases brought by state law enforcement. So if Manafort hoped he might become the next Joe Arpaio, the special counsel seems to have closed off that escape route.

That would only be the latest rude surprise Mueller has delivered to Manafort. On July 26, before dawn, F.B.I. agents raided Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia, home, at the special counsel’s behest. It was reported this week that Mueller issued subpoenas to Manafort’s former lawyer and his current spokesman. Mueller would no doubt be thrilled to have Manafort become a cooperating witness, and there has been breathless speculation that these latest actions might be designed to turn up the pressure. Veteran prosecutors scoff. “The ‘send-a-message’ stuff is bullshit,” says Peter Zeidenberg, who was part of the federal team in the Scooter Libby leak case. “Nobody operates that way. They just want the documents, and they’re doing what they need to do to get them. It’s a very aggressive move.”

Mueller could have asked nicely, but the raid likely indicates he thought there was a chance Manafort might withhold or destroy evidence. The substance of what, if anything, he found in the material is crucial, of course. But so far the greatest significance is that the raid happened at all. “The search warrant is extremely important,” says Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor with an expertise in securities and commodities fraud. “That’s probably the most important development there has been in Mueller’s investigation to date. It indicates that Mueller believes that he has evidence that he can prove there is a good reason to believe a crime has occurred, and that evidence of that crime was at Paul Manafort’s home. It also means he presented that evidence to a neutral third party—a federal magistrate judge. And that judge concluded that Mueller was right, that there is probable cause. It’s the first time an independent person has indicated there is evidence a crime has been committed.” Manafort has denied any wrongdoing. (A spokesperson for Manafort declined to comment.)

The beginning of this drama lasted seven months and assembled a bewildering array of characters and scenarios. “From January to July it felt like all these plotlines were tossed out there and you couldn’t tell if anything was going to cohere,” a Senate Democratic operative who has kept close tabs on the investigation says. “Then you had Don Jr.’s e-mails about the Trump Tower meeting, and it was like the curtain came down on Act One: ‘A-ha!’”